Tabby EVO – the $4000 open source electric car you can build yourself in an hour

Do you want to know what’s keeping car industry execs awake at night right now? It’s not oil prices, it’s the convergence of open source and 3D printing technologies. Sure, right now the whole idea of DIY cars is a pipe dream, but look forward a decade or so and you can easily see a situation where car production goes completely local.

The new Tabby EVO is a prime example of how things could develop in the future. This open source car is offered as a basic set of plans which anyone can download and build with their choice of materials and drivetrain. The company behind the effort are actually not trying to be a car company, but a facilitator for many different local car companies, which can use their free plans as a starting point for their own projects.

One of the first demonstrations of this idea was the Nika, which was on show at the back end of last year. The vehicle comes with a 10 inch tablet as the dashboard, and is completely based on the Tabby platform. The idea is for this design again to form the basis of a generic car range which can be branded as needed for a particular market.

It should be mentioned that the early vehicles from the company are all road legal as quadricycle, which means lighter licensing requirements, but also lower speeds. However, they are now working on getting approvals for fully road legal vehicles which are highway compatible. This new EVO model, for example, is able to manage a range of 87 miles, with a top speed of 80 mph and it can be configured for 2 or 4 passengers.

As with all of this kind of work though, it’s going to take time to meet all the legal hurdles to getting this classed as a fully legal road vehicle, but you can still download the plans from the company’s website right now, and start building under their Alpha plan. But we’ll definitely keep an eye on this for the future, because it looks like it could end up creating some serious waves. More here.

Nigel is the managing editor of the Red Ferret, as well as a freelance columnist for the Sunday Times newspaper in London. Loves tech and fancies himself as a bit of a futurist, but then don’t we all?